Sweet Home Chicago

Seeing the Bears go to the Super Bowl this year has me in a nostalgic kind of mood. I miss some things about Chicago like the lake front, the Art Institute, shopping downtown , and mostly the food. Italian beef sandwiches, Chicago-style hot dogs and deep dish pizza don't make it too far outside of Chicagoland (except for Uno's, which are everywhere now and have all the charm of TGI Friday's.) I'm going to do something about it, if only on an extremely local scale.

This weekend, I'm attempting Gino's East deep dish pizza, with the signature golden crust and patty sausage topping. In my searching I came across a food blog and a forum on ChefTalk that both go into the gritty details of Gino's crust. Corn meal? Food coloring? Rise overnight? So many variables, so many guesses. I followed what is claimed to be the real crust recipe, and it is rising in my fridge until baking time tomorrow to get a nice fermented taste.

I tried something to color the crust yellow that none of these other bloggers did, and that was achiote (annatto) oil. It's commonly used in Latin American food to give yellow color to rice and pastry dough, and it's made simply by heating annatto seeds with oil. It has no aroma and as far as I can tell, no taste. I took 1/3 cup of the corn oil needed for the dough and heated it with 1 tsp of annatto seeds over low heat for about 10 minutes. After this time, it seemed like the seeds had given as much color as they were going to give. In retrospect, 2 tsp of seeds wouldn't have been too much as my dough came out kind of pale. The yellow tint in the crust is purely a psychological weapon, but I feel it's important.

One last thing I think I'll change is the cheese quantity. One pound just doesn't seem like enough for a 12 inch pie. We'll see.